A woman who was held captive and repeatedly raped from the age of 14 has been given a court order allowing her to force the sale of her abuser’s house.
According to journalist Charlie Peters, the woman known as Liz, was held captive in a flat for ten weeks and repeatedly raped and abused until a local campaign group managed to secure her release.
Her abuser, taxi driver Asghar Bostan (52) was jailed for 9 years in 2018.
During the trial Liz recounted being raped twice a day while being fed a coctail of alcohol and drugs.
Unbeknownst to Liz, Bostan was moved to an open prison in 2020 and was released in 2022 having served under 5 years of his sentence.
A successful civil prosecution led to a High Court Order that Bostan pay Liz a total of £425,934.09 in damages last March, with the court handing down a Charging Order this week which will allow Liz to force sale on a property Bostan owns in Rotherham.
It was reported that due to the accruement of interest on the damagers the amount is now in the region of £450,000.
Speaking to the BBC in March, Liz said she hoped her legal victory – the first of its kind in the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal which spanned from 1997 – 2013 and to date has uncovered 1,500 victims – would pave the way for other victims.
“I wanted to give something back not only to myself, but to other survivors and do something not only for Rotherham but for all the UK,” she said.
Saying she was “really pleased” to have secured the damages against Bostan, Liz said “It will never heal the past, we will always walk in these shoes, but it is about closing a chapter.”
Liz participated in a GBN News documentary called Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame which explores accounts of some of the victims of the Rotherham grooming scandal where men, mostly of Pakistani heritage, participated in the grooming and rape of underage girls.
Last June Gript published details of a report into the sex abuse of underage girls in the care of the Irish state.
In that report which was produced by academics at UCD parallels were drawn to the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.
Researchers went as far as to reference the abuse perpetrated by gangs of men in Rochdale and Rotherham in England, stating:
“Such discomfort is especially worrying in the light of evidence of the sexual exploitation of children reported in Rochdale and Rotherham in the UK, as discussed in the literature review, where many failures existed of agencies unable to see and intervene in systems of pimping and sexual exploitation of children here.
“Participants in this study are also concerned that sexual exploitation of children may be widespread here but is not being talked about and instead is kept under the radar.”
Read the full report here.